He stood there, looking toward me—and I understood: he waited in loving Christian patience for me, the belated straggler. The assurances of solace, which his thriftily smiling mouth had excreted in small, murmuring rations of verbal gruel, had vanished without a trace into the furbelow rills of his ruff. He was now gathering a new little portion for me. His hands were concealed on his stomach, inside the folds of his sleeves, as though doing something indecent (the right hand didn’t know what the left hand was doing). Now, they hastily slipped out to seize my hand—

first, slightly arched in the prayer position of Dürer’s mother’s hands, lurking as a trap to snatch the timidly offered hand like a broken-winged bird: with two simultaneous lunges, one reaching under the prey, the other quickly covering it. At the same time, he closed his eyes—presumably to roll them Jesus-wards behind his lids. And, with his fingers contracting into a meaningful suction grip over mine, his listing shepherd’s head tilted back, while his eyes reopened, offering their watery void—sea-blue—to the wafting sighs.

It was as if he had spiritually grabbed me by the balls. I wanted to pull back my hand, but he held tight. And while his mouth over the ruff drawled at me, “You were his best friend—I know!” (how did he know? The church and the funeral parlor were obviously in cahoots, like Interpol), he pulled, or rather pushed, me to a chair standing somewhat away from the first row and directly in front of the heraldic foam of lilac. I compliantly seated myself, thankful that his Lutheranly licensed freebooter grab at my emotional world had not incorporated me, but instead had separated me from his flock—depositing me on the edge of the plate, like a fly that has dropped into the soup.

But I was to be mistaken. While sneaking along the wall, I had pulled the gazes of the congregation along with me like rubber bands; but since little more than my shoulders and the back of my head was offered to their delectation, those gazes had gradually turned from me and were worshipfully fixed straight ahead, until the downtrodden cousin twice removed had surmounted his Pachelbel on the organ. The galvanized pipe clusters, quivering in their steep flanks, were exuding their final, rigorously structured shrieks into the paraboloid vault of the cremation temple. Then, devotional silence, astir with stifled coughs and noses blown into handkerchiefs, fanned out through the space.

As usual, I vividly pictured what had to happen:

To my right, there would be a whispering, like reeds swishing the secret that King Midas had donkey’s ears . . . and Witte’s giant figure would rise up out of the whispers, hand his black burgher’s hat to the aunt, and ponderously stride toward the hill of flowers in order to turn on his heels at the head of the coffin and show us the club cocarde of his countenance: the sea-blue eyes shining in the apoplectic red and surrounded by the flickering white blaze of his silvery lion’s mane. He would roll his padded shoulders as though priming himself to lift the flowery slope at his feet—but no: he merely raised his fist to his mouth and cleared his throat resoundingly into his hand, cleared the mucus-lined spaciousness of his cigar-smoker’s bronchia into the echoing vault of the cremation temple. Then he dropped his head. Remained in mute concentration. Jerked his white-blazing skull up again in order to hurl out a gaze and enclose us, all of us, and with us Hamburg—and Germany—and the vast ocean—the globe—the starry cosmos—and in it, GOD—enclose us all with a single gaze hurled out into eternity.